Was Fanta Invented By The Nazis? – Mythbusting Berlin

“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”
Winston Churchill urging nations to unite against Nazi Germany (January 20th 1940)

The Third Reich, a regime fixated on the purity of a fictitious Aryan race, extended its ideological grip to the very dinner plates of its citizens.

Nazi agricultural policies, a blend of romanticised peasant idealism and brutal pragmatism, aimed for self-sufficiency, a state known as Autarky.

This obsession with national health, however, twisted into a grim parody of well-being, where the ideal German diet was less about nutrition and more about nationalistic purity.

Yet, for all their rhetoric of a self-sustaining empire, the Nazis faced the stark reality of their economic limitations. The dream of Autarky crumbled against the unyielding need for essential resources like rubber, manganese, and grain.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a cynical alliance of convenience, temporarily plugged these gaps, with the Soviet Union providing the raw materials that fuelled the German war machine for the invasion of their newfound trading partner.

But as the war machine devoured resources, the German home front felt the pinch.

By 1939, Germany became self-sufficient in bread, potatoes, sugar and meat but15 per cent of food supplies were still being imported.

Shortages of fats, pulses and eggs meant rationing; and from early 1939 also coffee and fruit (esp imports like bananas and oranges). This lack of supplies would lead to a flourishing black market of goods – and fuel the Nazi appetite for conquest, as a justification for survival.

The Nazi regime, ever mindful of public morale, understood that a happy populace was a compliant one. Beyond the grim necessities, there was a need for the small pleasures, the everyday comforts that could distract from the ever-present realities of war.

It was in this climate of scarcity and enforced cheerfulness that a new beverage would emerge, a drink born from the leftovers of a crippled economy, a fizzy symbol of wartime invention.